Good stuff!

There is no "technology" prior to the modern world--no "conquest of nature," if not in tales that reject the hypothetical project as absurd.

18:07 left off

This was effectively and coherently laid out. Thank you for this work.

Not that it has anything to do with this discussion, but before I forget. The error of Straussian thought seems bare before beginning. It is common in the Study of Truth, as a whole. Truth, unlike other sciences, has a fixed locus and terminus. Innovation often learns beyond Truth. Certainly beyond the ethics of truth in areas of sociological impact. I have no knowledge of him, or, the field so I only speak from the anecdotal point of observable results since I began to engage modern thought. I will listen now and learn more to see if my theory from observation has any validity.

; A good contrast. Another way to approach this topic would be to contrast Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy with George Sabine’s A History of Political Theory.

I don't think rights or natural rights applies to fortune.

Thanku

38:00 the religion question is deeper than the mistakes of the militant atheists, Stalin was a devout orthodox Christian - the churches were corrupt

Geuss is an interesting philosopher and theorist, but his not-entirely-rational hatred for John Rawls and Robert Nozick sometimes leads him astray.

17:00 Social media is not to blame for our loss of attention span, our lack of thought, our lack of reading? One book in the last two years is the average reader today.

Well, justice boils down into teleology: what is the end men are meant to achieve. Voegelin noted well enough the messianic element out of place: the complete terrestrialization of the eschaton. If men loose the sense of eternity, nothing is left to be thought or done. Plato is highly controversial. The republic and The laws can be read as the first blueprint of a new world order. Now that the technological means are available, those two works are no more to be taken as a satire or a distant utopia. In the antiquity or in the middle ages, the lack of state was probably more a danger than the excess. It hardly could have swallowed those other social institutions that kept it in check, but that is past and gone. The greatest political virtue is the sense of eternity, not the sense of history. Without the first, the second must inevitably fall into historicism, as in Hegel. What profits a man to gain the whole world if by so he looses his soul?

Imagine here for the title.

Nietzsche was an Aristocratic Radical not a Liberal. He thought that the Ubermensch ideal would necessarily lead to an ever more crushing aristocratic elite. So Strauss is wrong in his take here - at least as you describe it.

Correction - you do NOT live in a 'liberal democracy ' in Australia. Australia is in fact a PLUTOCRACY - just like The US, Canada, Britain, New Zealand etc. Wealthy lobbyists and monopolistic corporations buy politicians who do their bidding while ignoring the people that voted them in. Essentially, it makes no difference which politician or political party you vote for - and that is a big practical problem for implementing a Rawlsian theory of justice.

Great but unless you can regulate nature itself, you b punching over your weight limit. Live within in the strictures of nature or go your own way. Only that which is defensible survives-=yea, that part. If one chews on that notion he B inviting destruction, which in turn is a corruption of nature which is where we are now. Honky dorry . . . .and you think I’m on that dope.

42:24 exceptionally bad take on Calvinism and reformed theology.

As someone who is familiar with Strauss, which of these books do you recommend for a beginner to Strauss's thought, "What is Political Philosophy?" (1959) or "An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays" (ed. Gildin, 1989)? I am thinking of purchasing the latter combined with "Natural Rights and History" (1999).

2:57 Alasdair MacIntyre famously (and proudly) does not hold a doctorate; and seeing that he is about the same age as Charles Taylor - in fact, he’s a bit older - the idea of him having been supervised by Taylor is factually wrong in several ways. I wonder who you might have meant though?

Clear, concise, and insightful. Thank you!

This is the best concise explanation of Rawls I've found.

we were taught at AUTH University (Greece), his book "Intolerances of modernity, in the last year. Amazed and wise. Thank you very much sir.

Strauss can't see past his own biases

I love your explanation and I’m surprised I understood the context easily. I have become interested in philosophy lately and I’m so glad that there are video like these.

You get a thumbs up for the title alone

You guys are terrific. Hope you are still creating videos

This suggests Strauss, in effect, was preoccupied with refuting elements of Nietzsche's thought. Though you make the "Enlightenment project" sound like a form of value relativism. Not sure how Kant would fit into that framing. Surely Rawls has as much a claim to representing that project as anyone, and he would have rejected the concept of radical individualism. Individuals are unthinkable apart from institutions, as Hegel showed and the Ancients presupposed. To say that modern thought wants to "ground our values in reason itself" is just another way of saying it wants to ground (= give an account/justification of) values. There is no alternative to this endeavor, i.e., an account in irrational terms. Even an account of values in terms of revelation is rational. Reason by its nature seeks the universal among the particular, the formula in the manifold. Nietzsche's view of reason must be allocated to a series of false conceptions of the rational, that is, of what would constitute the true 'irrational.' Ultimately, only reason contravenes the boundaries of the rational by claiming more order/predictability etc., than is warranted. Why do so many post-Hegelian thinkers attack reason as if it were the root of self-deception rather than accepting it for what it is - - the correlate of the order of the universe/cosmos? Why do so few British thinkers view reason skeptically? One could argue, Hume's idea that reason just cleans up after the passions is the template of all restrictions of reason's authority. In fact, it is another formula for a false irrational. Nothing about the passions contravenes the order of the universe which is the correlate and inspiration for the human, discursive-systematic ordering (account giving) of phenomena. Strauss's defense of revelation against Spinoza does not proceed against reason, but against Spinoza's rationalist prejudices. They are not the same thing. It's best to put the notion to bed that there is an alternative to reason, from the human perspective. Do black holes contradict the order of the cosmos? Obviously not. And if they constitute a dimension of the structure of galaxies, it's hard to see that any of the candidates for the ostensible irrational we have come up with (matter, the passions, the God of Abraham, etc.) fits the bill.

Strauss is structure in a contingent world - contingent when it's convenient.

I am from india. Hindi is my native language. But u should upload the more videos regarding jurist. I will watch.

Love it, thanks for posting. Strauss, Kojève are back as soon as a retvrn to proper optimism is needed, when stupid optimism à la Frankfurt school is over

Great video

Yo what's the music at the start

I have a hard time understanding this, but I’ll be checking this later to see if I get it better. It’s very interesting! Thanks for sharing

Hey, what's the music piece at the beginning? Nice YT channel btw...

Leo Strauss and the Straussians are proof that one should never judge a creator by the fandom.

I am bringing Taylor’s account of authenticity into my PhD work concerning collaborative innovation in the public sector. I see this formulation of authenticity as having generative qualities towards a collective will among those relevant and affective actors engaged in efforts of collaborative innovation - where an emphasis upon co-creation is amplified.

Great content. Subscribed.

this is really good but waaaaaay over monetized I almost turned it off I get you need adds but every five minutes is too much.

Nice wrap up, you got the leo well

This men has saved me from the nihilism that is the necessary follow up of historicism, not to talk about the apory of modern positivism. By the way, the chinese have translated and studied all strauss works in order to understand the madness of the west.

Great video. Thank you. I read this essay years ago, and you did a wonderful job of analyzing it.

Witty video title and an interesting subject.

Sir may I contact you?

(((Leo Strauss)))= Zionist manipulator

Greetings from Greece! Thank you so much for this podcast 🙂Keeps me company when I work and/or run. Keep up the good work!

Incisive and illuminating. I loved this.

No, in Plato’s republic it was a flat out lie Men were born from the earth with metals in their souls

Great video, thanks! I’m incredibly surprised that we’re still in a battle between the sophists (relativism) and the philosophers (objective truths) Plato’s Republic is a bible Even your point about technology is an example of something that a philosopher, someone who knows the difference e tween good and evil, or someone who re river a proper education could tell you that no thing in itself is good or evil, like money for example, it is the usage of that thing that produces the good or evil.

Long comment incoming. Initial small caricature of Thucydides was almost a turn-off. Maybe that’s just me. Or I’m reading him wrong and that it’s not a caricature. Maybe what he’s saying is history ought to be exciting even if rigorous, but not overly academic that it is dull. It might be true that Thucydides’ approach is limited, but it isn’t utterly wrong. Reading him also wasn’t dry for me. And I agree, Herodotus ought to be taken seriously, which weirdly Nietzsche (aphorist and proto-postmodernist himself) did not. I’ve studied Philippine history, so I may give three examples who fall on one side then the other. Reynaldo Ileto falls on Herodotus’ side, and relies on predominantly oral and lyrical sources for his major work Pasyon and Revolution (positively reviewed by Benedict Anderson and later disowned). Here, he reconstructed the categories of perception of the Filipino masses as a counter-rational and spiritual force leading up to the Philippine revolution against Spain. The work inspired a lot of national liberationists, but over time his work has been a point of reference for those criticizing his later reactionary turn, which also include some of those national liberationists though most are mum to say anything in his direction. Ileto has been a recent supporter of two right-wing presidents (Duterte and Marcos Jr) in two consecutive elections, and a denialist of decaperacidos and genocide (Marcos Sr), both of whom deny past crimes and human rights violations. Milagros Guerrero falls on the side of Thucydides, who scathingly criticizes Ileto’s lack of empirical primary sources (written documents). There’s a third who falls in the middle: a Marxist historian named Joseph Scalice, who criticizes Ileto’s categories of class consciousness which he says arises from his erroneous use of his chosen primary sources (the Bernardo Carpio legend and the Pasyon, a re-enactment of the Jesus’ story until death). Scalice writes poetically when he can, as someone influenced by Ileto, but he also treats history rigorously like a social science, like cultural anthropology and sociology (his dissertation is too big though and is still too full of documentary evidence, which does exhaust the point being made). So in past work, he reconstructed Ileto’s main themes using different methods (linguistics, mainly), while using the same sources. Dan Crowley also seems to possess a very hard view of “science,” that it is always empirical by default, implies the easy equating to reductive analyses and scientism, and is opposed to making history like that. There are those hard empiricists, but the social sciences aren’t that dogmatic as a whole. (Neither are the natural sciences. Maybe I see it this way because I read and imbibed ideas by Steven French and Michael Strevens.) History can be both an art form (storytelling) and a social science (unearthing of evidence of human activity, but of past events). I’m not sure that history as a science is disenchanting, outside of poor writing, or lacking philosophical value. I don’t think Collingwood, who is a philosopher-historian, who wrote “History as Science,” is unexciting. But maybe too much reliance on a metanarrative is boring, and Collingwood said something about the overreliance on teleology in history that is bound to miss something. His view of a scientific history, however, isn’t scientism or a softer version of it or a reductive analysis, because his method is “circular” and “iterative.” Anyway, I wrote this comment, because I’m sure this will feel sore for many Philippine historians, because they all approach, except one (Vicente Rafael), historiography like social science. Much of their work can be dry, and I may have gotten used to it. But I think one ought to at least be a realist about the relations between historical evidence, if the facts of history are wont to revise and reweave into new compelling narratives with each new discovery and reinvestigation. Aesthetic considerations and scientific considerations need not be incompatible. I ought to read Dan’s thesis, because White and Danto are the only other philosophers/theorists of history I know who are narrativists and I’ve not read too far into philosophy of history or the history of history. I’m getting way too attracted to studying it now. Thanks, Dan. Thanks to this podcast for continuing to be stimulating.

Fantastic. Great job. Well done Dan.